Reality Bites

I’m a Culture Critic &hellip; Get Me Out of Here!

Amid the smoldering wreckage of the popular culture, the author blames Reality TV, which has not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior, and murder.

Heidi Montag of The Hills. Photo Illustration by Darrow. From AJM/PA Photos/Landov.

Iwas recently in a Duane Reade drugstore, having a Hamlet fit of temporizing over which moisturizer to choose, when the normal tedium pervading the aisles was suddenly rent by the ranting distress of a young woman in her early 20s, pacing around and fuming into her cell phone. She made no effort to muffle her foulmouthed monologue, treating everyone to a one-sided tale of backstabbing betrayal—“She pretended to be my friend and shit all over me”—as mascara ran down her cheeks like raccoon tears. Judging from the unanimous round of stony expressions from customers and cashiers alike, her cri de coeur engendered no sympathy from the jury pool, partly because there was something phony about her angst, something “performative,” as they say in cultural studies. Her meltdown was reminding me of something, and then it flashed: this is how drama queens behave on Reality TV—a perfect mimicry of every spoiled snot licensed to pout on Bravo or VH1 or MTV. The thin-skinned, martyred pride, the petulant, self-centered psychodrama—she was playing the scene as if a camera crew were present, recording her wailing solo for the highlight reel. Proof, perhaps, that the ruinous effects of Reality TV have reached street level and invaded the behavioral bloodstream, goading attention junkies to act as if we’re all extras in their vanity production. There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies. Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s satire about a future society too dumb to wipe itself, now looks like a prescient documentary.

I’m not talking about competition shows where actual talent undergoes stress tests as creative imagination and problem solving enter a field of play—elimination contests such as Project Runway, Top Chef, and, for all its sob-sisterhood, America’s Next Top Model. It’s the series that clog the neural pathways of pop culture with the contrived antics of glorified nobodies and semi-cherished has-beens that may help pave the yellow brick road for Sarah Palin, Idiocracy’s warrior queen. It is a genre that has foisted upon us Dog the Bounty Hunter, with his racist mouth and Rapunzel mullet; tricked-out posses of Dynasty-throwback vamps and nail-salon addicts (The Real Housewives of Atlanta, et al., the stars of which pose in the promos in tight skirts and twin-torpedo tops like lamppost hookers auditioning for Irma la Douce); and endless replays of Rodney King throwing up on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America. Maybe America was already ruined, but if so, it’s now even more ruined. Let us itemize the crop damage.

Reality TV has lowered network property values. On his weekly blog, author James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) noted the significance of a memorial tribute to CBS news giant Walter Cronkite on 60 Minutes being followed by “a childish and stupid ‘reality’ show called ‘Big Brother,’” an Orwell-for-dummies exercise set in a hamster cage for preening narcissists where cameras surveil every calculated move. Kunstler observed, “This [scheduling] said even more about the craven quality of the people currently running CBS. It was also a useful lesson in the diminishing returns of technology as applied to television, since it should now be obvious that the expansion of cable broadcasting since the heyday of the ‘big three’ networks has led only to the mass replication of video garbage rather than a banquet of culture, as first touted.” Not entirely so. Quality cable dramas such as Nurse Jackie, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men have immeasurably enriched our petty lives, though there’s really no excuse for Californication. But it is also true that the mega-dosage of reality programming has lowered the lowest common denominator to pre-literacy. Cable networks originally conceived as cultural alcoves, such as Bravo and A&E (Arts and Entertainment), abandoned any arty aspirations years ago and rebranded themselves as vanity mirrors for the upwardly mobile (Bravo) and police blotters for crime buffs (A&E). Pop music has been all but relegated to the remainder bin at MTV and VH1, where high-maintenance concoctions such as Paris Hilton, Flavor Flav, and Hulk Hogan’s biohazard clan of bleached specimens provide endless hours of death-hastening diversion. Since reality programming is cheaper to produce than sitcoms or ensemble dramas (especially those requiring location shooting, which is why the Law & Order franchises spend less time on the streets, more time haunting the shadows of dimly lit sets), intricate brainteasers such as Bones (Fox), Lost (ABC), and the original CSI (CBS) have to fight even harder to hold their own against the plethora of reality shows catering to romantic fools looking to land a rich sucker—all those Bachelors and Bachelorettes sniffing red roses between tongue-wrestlings.

Reality TV has annihilated the classic documentary. When was the last time you saw a prime-time documentary devoted to a serious subject worthy of Edward R. Murrow’s smoke rings? Since never, that’s when. They’re extinct, relics of the prehistoric past, back when television pretended to espouse civic ideals. Murrow and his disciples have been supplanted by Jeff Probst, the grinny host of CBS’s Survivor, framed by torchlight in some godforsaken place and addressing an assembly of coconuts.

Reality TV wages class warfare and promotes proletarian exploitation. While the queen bee of Reality TV, Bravo executive Lauren Zalaznick, is fawned over in a New York Times Magazineprofile by Susan Dominus that elevates her into the Miranda Priestly of the exegetical empyrean (“To her, what she’s producing isn’t rampant consumerism on display to be emulated or mocked, or both—it’s a form of social anthropology, a cultural text as worthy of analysis as any other, an art form suitable for her intellect”), temporary serfdom is the lot of the peon drones being pushed to the breaking point. In an eye-opener published in The New York Times of August 2, reporter Edward Wyatt revealed the sweatshop secrets of Reality TV’s mini-stockades, where economic exploitation and psychological manipulation put the vise squeeze on contestants. “With no union representation, participants on reality series are not covered by Hollywood workplace rules governing meal breaks, minimum time off between shoots or even minimum wages,” Wyatt wrote. “Most of them, in fact, receive little to no pay for their work.” The migrant camera fodder is often kept isolated, sleep-deprived, and alcoholically louche to render the subjects edgy and pliant and susceptible to fits. “If you combine no sleep with alcohol and no food, emotions are going to run high and people are going to be acting crazy,” a former contestant on ABC’s The Bachelor said. And crazy makes for good TV, whether it’s Jeff Conaway unhinging on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew (“911!”) or some Bridezilla losing her precious shit over a typo in the wedding invitation. One particularly awful Bridezilla, named Karee Gibson Hart, whose threatening antics may have violated her probation, defended herself by claiming she was simply “playing the game,” putting on a diva act to show off her dramatic skills. Judge Judy might not buy that excuse, but there’s no question that reality programs often resemble drama workshops for hapless amateurs, a charmless edition of Waiting for Guffman.

Reality TV has debased the time-honored art of bad acting. Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style. What I can’t respect is bad acting that doesn’t make an effort. In Andy Warhol’s purgatorial version of home movies, those clinical studies of dermatology in action, his casts of beefcake/speed-freak/drag-queen exhibitionists had to work it for the camera, which kept rolling whether the objects of inspection were re-applying an eyelash or hogging the bathtub; his superstars had volumes of dead air to fill, no matter how near they were to nodding out. In John Cassavetes’s cinéma vérité psychodramas, the actors were hot-wired for improvisation, encouraged to trust their ids and forage for raw truth stashed beneath the polite lies that make up our sham existence. These lancings of bourgeois convention weren’t pretty, but they required sustained outbursts from the showboats involved, an expansive temperament. What kind of “acting” do we get from Reality TV? Eye-rollings. Dirty looks. Stick-figure Tinkertoy gestures. Incensed-mama head-waggings. Jaws dropped like drawbridges to convey stunned indignation.

Emotionally, Reality TV is emaciated, envy and spite being the alternating currents. Nearly everyone conforms to crude, cartoon stereotype (bitch, gold digger, flamboyant gay, recovering addict, sofa spud, anal perfectionist, rageaholic), making as many pinched faces as the Botox will permit, a small-caliber barrage of reaction shots that can be cut from any random stretch of footage and pasted in later to punctuate an exchange. (Someone says something unconstructive—“That outfit makes her look like a load”—and ping! comes the reaction shot, indicating the poison dart has struck home.) Younger reality stars may have more mobile faces, though in time they too will acquire the Noh masks of the celebrity undead. Their range of verbal expression runs mostly from chirpy to duh, as if their primpy little mouths were texting. The chatty, petty ricochet of Reality TV—the he-said-that-you-said-that-she-said-that-I-said-that-she-said-that-your-fat-ass-can-no-longer-fit-through-the-door—eventually provokes a contrived climax, a “shock ending” that is tipped off in promos for the show, teasers replayed so frequently that it’s as if the TV screen had the hiccups. The explosive payoff to the escalating sniper fire on The Real Housewives of New Jersey was a raging tantrum by Teresa Giudice, who flipped over a restaurant table in a She-Hulk fit of wrathful fury and called co-star Danielle Staub a “prostitution whore” (an interesting redundancy), all of which helped make for a unique dining experience and quite a season finale. Good manners and decorum are anathema to Reality TV, where impulsivity swings for the fences.

Reality TV encourages and rewards vulgar, selfish, antisocial, pissy-pants behavior. Ever since “Puck” put MTV’s Real World on the map with his nose-picking, homophobic, rebel-without-a-clue posturings and earned notoriety as the first contestant to be evicted from the premises, self-centered jerkhood has put reality’s lab rats on the publicity fast track. On Bravo’s Shear Genius, Tabatha Coffey, doing a sawed-off version of Cruella De Vil, gloated with nasty delight after being eliminated from the show in a team challenge, because she was able to take a despised rival down with her; she exuded such Schadenfreude that she made losing look like sweet victory, a sacrifice worth making to louse up someone else’s chances. And what was the fallout from her unsporting, cold-dish behavior? Why, she received her own Bravo show—Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, where she got to be a bossy boots, bestowing her bad attitude on the less fortunate. TLC’s Jon & Kate plus Eight was a popular, wholesome family favorite, but it was a tacky act of alleged infidelity that turned the marital split of Jon and Kate Gosselin into a nova express, their uncivil war splashed across checkout-magazine covers as America took sides, choosing between Jon, the philandering dope with the dazed expression, and Kate, the castrator with the choppy Posh Spice hair. We are now stuck with them for the foreseeable future, just as we are saddled with MTV’s The Hills’ Spencer Pratt, who has just brought out a book—which is probably one more than he’s ever actually read—in which he caddishly boasts about his bastardly behavior toward Lauren Conrad, exulting in the wet hisses he and his wife, Heidi Montag, receive as America’s least-admired bobbleheads. From the New York Daily News: “He brags in the book that he made a point of telling every blog around that a sex tape of nemesis [and former Hills star] Lauren Conrad existed. Why? Because he could. He &hellip; says he wouldn’t have personally attacked Conrad had she not been so darn nasty to his then-girlfriend Montag.” He’s now thumping his chest in triumph at having helped drive Conrad off the show. “‘If I weren’t me, I’d hate me,’ he announces.” I hate him and I’ve never even seen The Hills, which only testifies to Reality TV’s phenomenal outreach, its ability to annoy even the uninitiated.

The ego maneuvers of a Tabatha or Spencer are minor-league Machiavelli compared with the latest scar on Reality TV’s record—the savage murder of former bikini model Jasmine Fiore, whose mutilated body was jammed into a trunk and discovered in a Dumpster. The chief suspect was her former husband, a reality star named Ryan Alexander Jenkins, whose paltry claim to fame was his having been a contestant on the VH1 reality show Megan Wants a Millionaire, that ample contribution to humanity. (The Megan in want of a millionaire is Megan Hauserman, a graduate of VH1’s Rock of Love: Charm School, who aspires to the title of “trophy wife.”) “The case cast an unsettling light on the casting practices of reality television, in particular the sometimes tawdry shows broadcast by VH1,” reported Brian Stelter, in a New York Times story headlined, with a delicate understatement bordering on self-parody, killing raises new reality tv concerns. Proper vetting would have revealed that Jenkins had been previously convicted of assault against a woman and would perhaps have disqualified him from appearing on Megan Wants a Millionaire and I Love Money 3 (also VH1). Nine days after Fiore’s disappearance, Jenkins was found hanging dead in a motel room, his suicide completing the circle of misery, brutality, and fame-grubbing futility. In his final caper novel, Get Real, the late Donald Westlake had his woebegone protagonist Dortmunder and his gang cast in a Reality TV series that would have them plotting and executing a heist as a camera crew tagged along, borderline accomplices in crime. An ingenious story line, but Get Real may have been outdone and then some by the Brazilian series Canal Livre, whose host, Wallace Souza, is alleged to have commissioned a fistful of murders to bump off rivals in the drug trade and to ensure that his cameras would be the first on the scene for the buzzard feast (arriving so promptly that gun smoke was still streaming from one victim’s body). Ordering a hit and then dining out on the corpse—talk about controlling supply and demand at both ends!

Reality TV gives voyeurism a dirty name. For film directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Andy Warhol to Brian De Palma to Sam Peckinpah (whose last film, The Osterman Weekend, was set in a house rigged with closed-circuit TV) to Michael Haneke (Caché), voyeurism has been one of the great self-reflexive themes in postwar cinema, James Stewart with his zoom lens in Rear Window being the primary stand-in for us, the audience, spying at life through a long-range gaze. In thrillers, the idle viewer becomes implicated, ensnared, in the drama unfolding and discovers that voyeurism is a two-way mirror: Raymond Burr, the watched, glares across the courtyard and meets Stewart’s binocular gaze—contact. In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer’s passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.